Your first paragraph is the second most important part of your content

Author: webmaster

29Oct

Make your lead paragraph as clear and uncluttered as it can possibly be.

If a visitor has been interested enough in your headline to continue reading, the next thing they will read is your opening paragraph where you have to give the same benefits with a little more detail.

You can’t explain everything with your first paragraph. So find the most important idea you want to put across, explain what it is and perhaps begin to elaborate on it.

For example, this article’s lead is:

“Your content will get noticed, get read and get customers if you use your headlines and first paragraphs to let readers know what is in it for them. Here we’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen.”

It starts with a benefit:

“… get noticed, get read and get customers …”

… and then comes a summary of how to achieve that:

“… if you use your headline and first paragraph to tell readers what is in it for them”

Then the second sentence repeats the benefit with some detail about how this will be achieved:

“… we’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen”.

Hopefully we’ve achieved what this first paragraph promised and in the future no visitors to your site will leave without you having done everything you can to get them to read on and reach your marketing. – source: WordTracker.